In electrophotographic image forming apparatuses, it is widely performed to press a cleaning blade against the surface of an image carrying member to scrape a toner remaining on the image carrying member. Lubricant application devices, in which in order to reduce the friction between the image carrying member and the cleaning blade in scraping the toner, a brush roller rotating while contacting the image carrying member and a solid lubricant, shaves the solid lubricant and applies the shaved solid lubricant onto the image carrying member, are publicly known.
Furthermore, in Patent Documents 1 and 2, there is disclosed a technical idea in which a flicker abutting against the brush roller is disposed in the lubricant application device and the flicker knocks off a developer adhering to the brush roller through a rotation force of the brush roller.
In conventional lubricant application devices, the brush roller in which rigid brushes made of a resin are implanted are employed, but this brush roller tends to supply an insufficient solid lubricant since it shaves the solid lubricant in streak form. Therefore, it is investigated to scrape the solid lubricant uniformly by applying a brush roller having many soft brushes like a raised cloth wound around a shaft to stabilize lubrication performance. However, this method has a problem that when the flicker is used for the soft brushes, brushes are damaged and therefore it becomes impossible to scrape and apply the lubricant properly.    Patent Document 1: Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2002-278403    Patent Document 2: Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 9-54531